From her vantage point on the cliff she could see into the great valley, where spires of smoke rose in hundreds. There was burning, burning everywhere. Often, as a child, she had sat looking down into that purple distance, the tiny clusters of dome-roofs on the trees below, the narrow dirt-trails where the People had walked, the wall of stones that marked the perimeter of the valley, and kept Min and her grandmother out. She had looked and wondered why her grandmother never spoke of their exile. It had seemed so inconceivable that she, Min, had been born down in the valley that was The World, where there was bustle and festivals and countless people of her kind. Only, in these last, desperate days, with the foreign ships coming from the sky, the sun getting fiercer and larger, there had been nothing left in the valley below but the smoke spires of the dead. Once, long ago, Min had heard her grandmother singing under her breath as she sat on a branch of their hometree: "The valley is the World," she had sung, "the womb in which we live, the grave in which we die". The young Min, climbing up from their roof to where the grandmother sat impossibly high, had seen tears on the withered cheek. Why did you give up The World, grandmother, she had wanted to ask. When you give up the World, do you live, do you die?
Now she stood looking down into the valley in the last morning of the world, and there would never be any more answers. If she could ask her grandmother just one questions she would say "what shall I do, shall I take my sacred things and light the fire and burn myself to ashes like the People have done, the ones who were not taken away by force by the silver ships, or shall I go, grandmother, to where the ship waits on the mountain top, and even now watches me through its mobile, metallic eye. And here the drone fell gently toward her, as though summoned by the thought, and it hovered a few feet from the top of her head. A wind sprang up, sudden and fierce, and Min felt her heart beating in answer.
All she had known all her life was exile, the stark, windswept beauty of the cliff-top in the winter, the buds blossoming on their hometree in the season of renewal. It had been a hard life, working with the old woman, repairing the roof after a rainstorm, gathering roots, shelling cerac-fruit, making fires, learning the sacred ways of the world that was outside The World. Her grandmother, taciturn to begin with, had grown into silence, speaking with her eyes and hands, not answering when Min asked her suddenly one day if there were other settlements anywhere like the valley that was The World. It had occurred to her that the question was blasphemous in some way, but it was an exciting thought. "Grandmother, let us look for another valley," she had said. "Perhaps they will not bar their gates to us. Perhaps we can be among our kind..." And a tear had sprung up in her eye for she had been lonely then. The grandmother spoke without warning in a voice like the hometree's branches in the wind. "Do you think I have not searched? Yes there are other valleys. And they will perhaps let us in --- but will they let us out?"
The sun was already a massive red disc in the sky, now, the old sun, the reliable sun, prayed to and worshipped, now turning into a monster. She remembered what the aliens had said to her on that unforgettable day, speaking haltingly in her tongue, looking uncannily like her own people, but for the unfamiliar outer skin they wore and the peculiar gray-brown pallor of their skin. "Your planet," they had said, "will burn in the sun. You will die-burn. Come with us and we will take you to our world, where you will work-produce newly, togetherfully." She had not understood the awkward juxtaposition of the last few words, all she had known was that the whole world and all the worlds it contained, all the valleys, would burn. And it was her duty to burn with it.
Or was it?
She made the fire as her grandmother had taught her, while the drone floated above her. Then she shook the things gently from her sack, into the flames.
The fire leaped and blazed. The skin she had first shed unfolded, every pattern and webbing on it outlined in fiery colors. She caught her breath. Then there was the Naming Leaf, the coil of hair from her grandmother's head, the tokens and souvenirs of their days on this world. All on fire. She felt the heat touch her gently through the shimmering air, drew in the smoke through her nostrils as though she was breathing in the very world, and all her memories and questings and longings with it. At first she felt that her body was burning too, but it was only the insane heat of the sun; the fire was dying. There, it was all done. She sat watching the embers until they turned to ashes, then she stood up slowly, numbly, and made her way back to her hometree. The ship's people would come soon to rescue her, to take her to their world, one she could not even imagine. There she was to learn to be someone else, a productive citizen in the great, thriving commercial center of the galaxy. If only she knew what those words meant!
Her grandmother had told her not to trust words, because they were only shadows, and shadows can look longer or shorter than the truth itself. Walking back, she felt her grandmother's presence inside her, and the weight of the silence of all those years like an umbilicus, connecting her to the sun, the world, even as they burned.
Bio:Vandana Singh was born and raised in India and now lives in the U.S. A former physicist, she now devotes her time to writing science fiction, fantasy and nonfiction. In much of her writing she draws upon issues of culture, tradition, conflict and oppression as well as science. This story first appeared in the webzine of the South Asian Women's Forum at www.sawf.org.
E-mail: lekha@mindspring.com
URL: lekha.home.mindspring.com
Visit Aphelion's Lettercolumn and voice your opinion of this story.
Return to the Aphelion main page.